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White
House officials put last-minute thumbscrews on posturing
"antiwar" Democrats as Congress voted by a 368-60 margin to
appropriate an additional $96.7 billion for Obama’s
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The May 15 vote was proof
positive that the Obama administration had no
intention of even paying lip-service to the Status of Forces Agreements
(SOFA) that U.S. combat troops would be
removed from Iraqi cities by June 30.
Indeed,
the U.S. killing machine there, headed by Bush/Obama
appointee Gen. Ray Odierno, was already in
"negotiations" with the U.S.-installed Nuri
Kamal al-Maliki
government to maintain U.S. combat troops in Mosul
and other parts of Iraq where resistance to the U.S. war and occupation
is on the rise—and with it, U.S. and Iraqi casualties.
"Mosul is one area where you may
see U.S. combat forces operating in
the city" after June 30, said Maj. Gen. David Perkins, top U.S. mouthpiece in Iraq.
Similarly,
in Baghdad there are no plans to
remove U.S. combat troops. Compliant
Iraqi officials there have agreed to re-draw the city’s maps to place Camp Victory’s base complex, which
houses more than 20,000 soldiers, many of them combat troops, outside the
city’s limits. The same ruse was employed with Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base
Falcon, where a slight of the pen placed these combat troops outside
the city limits.
The
SOFA accords were served up last year as a palliative to mass U.S. antiwar sentiment driven by
the Iraq War’s now-exposed Bush-era lies—"weapons of mass
destruction" and the Saddam Hussein regime’s alleged links to al-Qaeda. SOFA’s crucial
loopholes, hoopla notwithstanding, allow U.S. combat troops, often
re-classified in double-think style as non-combat troops, to remain in
Iraq indefinitely—defined in essence as until the U.S. extracts the
last drop of Iraqi oil and establishes what amounts to a
re-colonization of the region.
Meanwhile,
U.S. troops in Afghanistan will be bolstered by the
addition of 30,000 soldiers to quell the virtually universal mass
opposition to the over seven-year U.S. war and occupation.
In Pakistan, yet another mass slaughter
is underway as the Obama administration
pressures its dependent regime to deploy Pakistani troops to defeat and
destroy Pushtun Islamist groups who see
common cause with the Pushtun resistance in Afghanistan. All the while, U.S. warplanes rein death and
destruction on Pakistan, causing hundreds of
thousands of civilians to flee for their lives.
The
second open national antiwar conference called by the National Assembly
to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations—scheduled for
Pittsburgh, July 10-12—aims at uniting the broadest forces possible in
coordinated mass actions to challenge today’s Obama-led
war machine.
To
date the conference is the only national format where antiwar activists
across the country can gather to discuss and debate the movement’s
future. The National Assembly plays a unique role in today’s divided
antiwar movement in waging consistent struggles to overcome the present
organizational impasse.
Last
year’s May 2008 National Assembly conference in Cleveland drew more than 400
activists from every sector of the movement, and was endorsed by more
than 600 organizations and leading activists.
This
year’s conference includes some 19 workshops that cover a wide range of
issues designed to win the support and participation of broad and
diverse layers opposed to the war, as well as new constituencies. The
conference will be an opportunity to clarify the confusion around Afghanistan as the "good
war," and the role of the Obama
administration in perpetuating and escalating the policies of the Bush
regime.
In
a series of plenary sessions, and based on one-person-one vote, Pittsburgh conference participants
will adopt an Action Program based on texts submitted by activists
across the country. Leading representatives from United for Peace and
Justice, the ANSWER coalition, GI organizations, labor leaders and rank
and filers, immigrant rights activists, Palestinians who oppose U.S. support to the Israeli
occupation of their nation, and many others will join to demand
"U.S. Out Now!"
The
National Assembly played an important role in the mobilizations that
challenged the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and in the preparation of
the March 21 bi-coastal mobilizations in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The need for a united
antiwar movement has never been greater. Pittsburgh is the place to be
July 10. For further information and conference registration, contact
natassembly.org. Tel: (216) 736-4704.
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